Apple – PowerBook G4 17″
1″ thick, 6.8lbs, 1Ghz G4, 512Mb, 17″ display @ 1440×900, 60Gb drive, slot-load DVD-writer, GeForce4 440, gigabit ethernet, 54Mbps wireless network, Bluetooth, FireWire 800, 4.5 hours battery life… And it runs MacOS X, the FreeBSD/Mac hybrid OS that is apparently a UNIX geek’s wet dream.
I think putting Gb ethernet on a laptop is ridiculous; ISPs and large corporations are starting to use Gb ethernet for backbones and interconnects; it’s wasted on a laptop. Still, a machine to drool over, and only $3299 (US).
posted at 9:59 am on Wednesday, January 08, 2003 in Science and Technology | Comments (3)
The story gets worse.
The senseless tragedy only got more puzzling as Peel Region police revealed it wasn’t the first time the children had played with the “readily accessible” .45-calibre semi-automatic gun in the bedroom shared by Michael and his big brother in the family’s Mississauga townhouse.
Police also revealed that the gun is a Spanish-made Star Firestar 45, a cut-rate version of a military weapon that isn’t popular with gangs because it is relatively heavy and hard to conceal. Investigators are tracing the gun’s past.
I don’t understand. Why would someone in Mississauga need a .45? Why would they leave it loaded, in a bedroom where a six-year-old lives and plays?
This morning on the CBC there were interviews with parents and police officers who work to impress children with the dangers of real guns. The anecdotal evidence is that children do understand the difference between real guns and “playing cops and robbers”. Yet at the same time, we have this shooting (and the regular stream of them from our friends to the south).
I’m still trying to figure out how do deal with the whole “playing guns” issue with my kids. Whee.
Source: canada.com
posted at 11:46 am on Tuesday, January 07, 2003 in Rants | Comments (1)
It’s disgusting, the things you find on the web…
posted at 4:33 pm on Monday, January 06, 2003 in Odd | Comments Off on Female Nudity
Nike is taking their “Right To Lie” lawsuit to the US Supreme Court; details in this article.
It should be interesting; the legal distinction between “person” and “corporation” has been blurring recently, and (hopefully) the Supreme Court will remind corporations that they aren’t people…
posted at 10:52 am on Monday, January 06, 2003 in Current Events | Comments (1)
Atmospheric a-bomb testing comes back to haunt us. An article in New Scientist describes high levels of radioactive material in sea-bird guano, particularly uranium-238, radium-226, and cesium-137, the last of which does not occur naturally.
Particularly in the arctic, plants eat guano; animals eat plants; humans eat animals; all the while, radioactivity accumulates.
Someday we’ll wake up and realize we have to *live* in our own shit; we can’t just get rid of it. Hopefully that day won’t come too late…
posted at 9:58 am on Monday, January 06, 2003 in Science and Technology | Comments Off on Radioactive Guano
A 7 year old girl shot her 6 year old brother dead on Saturday in Mississauga. They found, and were playing with, a .45 semi-auto handgun (unregistered) when the girl pointed the gun at her brother and shot him in the head.
The owner of the gun was the two kids’ 22 year old brother, he has been arrested and charged with criminal negligence causing death and numerous firearms offences, including unsafe storage of both the gun and the ammunition.
The brother (through his lawyer) is pleading not guilty and planning on fighting the charges. So much for taking responsibility for his actions…
The boy is dead. The girl is permanently scarred. The family is irreparably damaged. All because this 22 year old is an idiot.
As chronicled elsewhere in this weblog, I have a friend with many guns. His pistols are locked in a small safe; all of his longarms and ammunition are locked in a separate steel cabinet, which has its own hookup to the alarm system. In addition, they all have trigger locks.
Leaving a weapon lying around unlocked is bad enough; lying around unlocked and loaded? I hope they bury this guy.
Naturally, the pistol was unregistered, showing yet again that the bungled Canadian firearm registry is useless as well as mismanaged.
Story links:
The Toronto Star
The Globe and Mail
Canada.com
CBC News
posted at 3:04 pm on Sunday, January 05, 2003 in Current Events, Rants | Comments Off on 7 year old shoots 6 year old
The Fly Guy is a fabulous little daydream; fly around, explore, have fun!
Thanks to Ginger for the link.
posted at 12:34 am on Friday, January 03, 2003 in Links, Odd | Comments Off on The Fly Guy
Finally, some reseachers have shown that those ickly overhead flourescent lights really do cause eyestrain in computer users. An article in Realage’s HealthBytes Newsletter, claims
a significant decrease in eyestrain, eye fatigue, sensitivity to light, blur with computer use, and glare or reflections from the computer screen
when overhead flourescents were fitted with an acrylic filter tinted to give off “more natural light”.
Ye gods, I despise overhead flourescents. I’m glad to see more concrete research in this area…
posted at 9:35 am on Thursday, January 02, 2003 in Science and Technology | Comments Off on Filter your flourescent lights
According to this article in New Scientist, China will attempt to launch a manned spacecraft in the second half of 2003. They’ve already successfully launched four fully functional, but unmanned, capsules.
It’ll be nice to have some competition again; maybe that’ll push the US space program out of the doldrums…
posted at 9:31 am on Thursday, January 02, 2003 in Current Events, Science and Technology | Comments Off on Chinese Manned Spaceflight?
jok 
RJ
Well Macs have generally been ahead of the curve. At home 10Mbps is totally impossible as I sometimes play videos across my lan which are recorded at 8-12Mbps so my 100Mbps lan is required. Now once you get a couple users going on your home lan playing say an HDTV stream which might be easily 25Mbps, you can see that a Gbps home LAN becomes a necessity, so why not corps, and why slow down a corp network just for one guys laptop (well unless you’re using smart routers all over the place instead of hubs).
Also, I’m regularly shoveling gigabytes around at home, why should a corporation expect any less of its users? (Where I work not only do I install Visual Studio and our sources every other week on some test system, but all of us install (different versions of) our product suite across the network on our PCs, sometimes several times a day)
Anyhow, that said, a 1Ghz CPU with a 60Gb hard drive is obsolete out of the box. You’d be lucky to store a few years of photos and couple of movies to watch on the plane on such a box and get adequate playback ripping and editing capabilities.
Funny that you should mention the GB ethernet. I was watching ScreenSavers on Tuesday (MacWorld Day), and the Woz showed up. They started talking about the new PowerBooks and how he was gonna order a couple.
Then, they got off the subject and started talking about how it must be difficult for him to walk around a place like MacWorld, where everyone recognizes him, stops him for autographs, etc. Woz replied that it’s not too often that he gets to realize his celebrity status like that.
The only other times he really gets noticed are when he buys shareware. The host asked him if he ever gets noticed when he buys Apple hardware, and he says that it’s only happened once. When the first PowerBook w/GB ethernet came out, he ordered 2 with the GB ethernet option.
A year later, someone called him up and told him that only 2 PowerBooks had been sold w/GB, and that he owned them both :-).
—
Mando
<laughter>
That Apple has sold two Gb Ethernet laptops in a year surprises me not at all. Except for very small niche markets, who needs Gb Ethernet to the desktop?